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Allow admin to define multiple sender emails and use them across the system

We've had a number of similar ideas - allow administrators to setup multiple "from" emails addresses (sender email) and use them in various scenarios like email blasts, event reminders, membership emails, etc. Currently all emails are sent from single FROM email, defined at Settings > Your Account > Organization Details > Email Settings

I merged all posts together so we can address them together properly. Quotes from some of original posts and comments:

"To avoid all site-related emails coming from a common sender, and risking email fatigue for our members, it would be terrific if one-off and system emails had a feature to customize the "From" email field to be someone's personal address, or even just a different alias. This would allow emails for specific purposes (e.g., particular forums or events) to come from an appropriate contact rather than our entire organization, which is less likely to be read."

"We would like to have an additional "From email for events", so that events would come from that address instead of the "From email" used everywhere."

"We would like to create additional emails associated with the *******.org domain through WA, so that our organization's officers have org-specific addresses they can send emails to other members from. Thank you!"

"We have various committees (governance, event planning, membership, public relations, and financial), each of which has its own email address. The committee chair and secretary sometimes each have their own email address. We would greatly appreciate having membership-related messages (membership application, invoices, confirmation messages) go to the membership committee email address, and event-related messages (registration, payment) go to the event planning committee address."

Randall Rensch
shared a merged idea:
Do not divulge personal email address to recipients of email blasts, as From or Reply-to · Aug 28, 2016 ·

Do not disclose any personal email address, as sender and/or reply-to, to the recipients of any mass mailing. IOW, allow the organization to specify an address at the organization's domain, which will forward to one or more personal addresses. (If you can't set up the autoforward, it can be done at the domain name Registrar (e.g. GoDaddy), or at Google, etc.) This is a serious personal security/privacy issue!

There is a serious issue with your implementation of custom domains and the "from email". I am building a wordpress site for my client that integrates with WA. My primary domain janedoeswell.org points to my WP site. I created a subdomain member.janedoeswell.org which I set to my primary custom domain on WA. WA automatically sets my from email to admin@member.janedoeswell.org. This is not a valid email address and if someone tried to use it it just goes off into never never land.

I think the the best solution is to let admins set their own "from email" address or let the contact email be the primary email. It is a bit odd to have then be different.

Constant Contact allows the email sender address to be changed to another domain (other than xx.wildapricot.org) - just for email blasts. Your system requires the whole domain be changed which is highly inconvenient. Thanks.

What people are asking is for the From address on emails to be the actual sender (e-blast sender, event organizer, etc.) rather than always the Organization contact. This is really important for several reasons I won't repeat here, but read the thread.

You already have the actual sender as the Reply-to in most cases. It should be the From as well. This is what people expect when receiving an email.

Dmitriy said that the Reply-to can't be used as the From because the From has to match the SPF record.

Here's my simple two-part solution.

First part: If the Reply-to address (the actual sender) is from our WA-hosted domain, then it matches the SPF record. So in this case, also use it as the "From."

Second part: If not, keep the Organization contact as the From, but put the actual sender in the name of the From, like this:

Similar to in event emails, it would be nice to be able to specify the "From" address for the membership-related system emails that go out automatically -- e.g., renewal notifications.

Right now, those emails are 'from' the site administrator email address. When recipients reply to these emails with questions or whatever, the reply goes to the site admin who then needs to forward them to the membership chairperson. We've specified the membership chair's email address in the "Routing of system emails" settings for membership emails, but that doesn't solve this problem.

It's sometimes confusing for the recipients of these emails and definitely a pain for the admin to have to forward replies to the membership chair. In larger organizations this can translate to hundreds of emails being forwarded.

Currently:
All email blasts are sent from the site administrator email.

Suggested:
Similar to GMail and Outlook, when creating a blast email (or an email template for events) the admin can select from a drop-down who the email should be from.

The list that you could select the sender from is built from:
1) All people with site admin privileges.
2) People with limited admin privileges. (For example, we could set it up that you would only have the option to set the sender to site administrators and Event limited administrators f you are sending an email from a list of event attendees).

Is this something that would benefit the way your organization handles communications? If so, how would you want to define who should be displayed as the "sender" for the email?

Do not disclose any personal email address, as sender and/or reply-to, to the recipients of any mass mailing. IOW, allow the organization to specify an address at the organization's domain, which will forward to one or more personal addresses. (If you can't set up the autoforward, it can be done at the domain name Registrar (e.g. GoDaddy), or at Google, etc.) This is a serious personal security/privacy issue!

I am trying to work around a common problem with email notifications for high priority notifications. Most of our members would prefer that high priority notifications come as a text message I know you hare probably tired of hearing about this request)

With a little more flexibility such as customization of the from email address, we could use the iPhone VIP feature which would provide a great Notification driven by an email.

The Gmail client Priority Inbox provides more flexibility in that you can identify a priority email based on email Subject criteria.

There is a serious issue with your implementation of custom domains and the "from email". I am building a wordpress site for my client that integrates with WA. My primary domain janedoeswell.org points to my WP site. I created a subdomain member.janedoeswell.org which I set to my primary custom domain on WA. WA automatically sets my from email to admin@member.janedoeswell.org. This is not a valid email address and if someone tried to use it it just goes off into never never land.

I think the the best solution is to let admins set their own "from email" address or let the contact email be the primary email. It is a bit odd to have then be different.

Like the other posters, we have different people handling different functions in our system (membership, event registration, finances etc), each with their own roll based email. Having emails pertaining to those areas send from (and reply to) those roll based emails would both make management easier and prevent important messages from getting lost in manual redirection.

I just wanted to add that I, too, would like to see an upgrade on this feature. Same as is done with Events, choosing email address, should be done here. Our membership chair should be the reply-to email address on the account. We haven't decided yet what email address to put as the main person but it would be nice if we could segregate the specific admin for certain auto-emails.

Constant Contact allows the email sender address to be changed to another domain (other than xx.wildapricot.org) - just for email blasts. Your system requires the whole domain be changed which is highly inconvenient. Thanks.

Walt, there is some confusion here and I'm sorry for this. "Feedback" button inside Wild Apricot is actually a window into Wishlist. So all your suggestion are searched in Wishlist forum and created in the forum.

I merged your comment suggestion into the one you have mentioned. I'm sorry again for the confusion, but thank you for sharing your suggestions again.

What people are asking is for the From address on emails to be the actual sender (e-blast sender, event organizer, etc.) rather than always the Organization contact. This is really important for several reasons I won't repeat here, but read the thread.

You already have the actual sender as the Reply-to in most cases. It should be the From as well. This is what people expect when receiving an email.

Dmitriy said that the Reply-to can't be used as the From because the From has to match the SPF record.

Here's my simple two-part solution.

First part: If the Reply-to address (the actual sender) is from our WA-hosted domain, then it matches the SPF record. So in this case, also use it as the "From."

Second part: If not, keep the Organization contact as the From, but put the actual sender in the name of the From, like this:

Here's a two-part solution for this problem with very little implementation effort.

An Apricot explained to me that the From field of the email can't be the Reply-To because From needs to be from our domain in order to pass spam checks. If "From" is a gmail.com address but sent by our website, it will look like spam.

But it would be legal for WA to use the Reply-to as the From in the cases where the email address is from our own domain hosted at WA. For example, we have a contact login "newsletters@tyc.org" that is used to send our weekly e-blast. tyc.org is our domain, so it could be used as the actual "From" address.

In cases where the Reply-To is not from our domain, include the Reply-To address in the name of the "From" email address.

My apologies for another comment on this, and for the critical tone. But as I use WA and stumble over ways it presents our club poorly, I feel the need to reemphasize the need for a quick, simple partial fix on this issue.

We are already allowed to specify a Reply-to contact for many if not most emails. Why not just use that for "From" as well?

It is just plain wrong for WA to send event emails and e-blasts "From" the organization-wide From email address when the "Reply-to" is the event organizer or blast sender. These fields should be the same, as they are on almost every email on the Internet except those sent under WA.

How big a fix would this be? Isn't this something that can be slipped into the next release without waiting for larger email solutions?

If you don't want to change overall behavior, then give us a checkbox in Dashboard / Organization to opt for this.

We need to be able to customize who the email is "from". Members are able to purchase our service to send out email blasts, and we are unable to do this unless we can change who the email is from, so that it is "from" the member who purchased the blast. Other email programs allow this, and I would really appreciate this feature on Wild Apricot. Thank you.